The way I understand it is that the idea of Record Sync is to replace the functionality of database views by creating relationships between tables which work like joins in views.
That being said, a big part of database views is joining transactional tables which store ref IDs with ref tables to get the display values. Would it be considered an anti-pattern to create a record type for a ref table and join that to the transactional record to display a ref id's display value, or is that under the intended functionality of Record Sync
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This is exactly what Appian has in mind. In most of my designs though, I keep my data models dumb and try to avoid reference tables using literals instead. I think that a simplified data model is a good match to low-code development.